The Virginian

Wednesday, February 28, 2018

The teens going on television to agitate for gun control after the Parkland shooting make the case, not for lowering the voting age, but for raising it.

Read the whole thing. Excerpt:

Consider the case of David Hogg, the one you’ve probably seen on TV the most. A few days ago he was responding to the unraveling of the Parkland narrative—the revelation that armed sheriff’s deputies had arrived at the shooting while it was in progress but made no attempt to stop the killer—by excusing the deputy, asking, “Who wants to go down the barrel of an AR-15?” (Never mind that the deputy had no way of knowing what weapon was being used.) Just a few days later, Hogg was on television (again), blaming the deputy’s inaction on…Florida Gov. Rick Scott.

These elected officials are the boss of these sheriff personnel and just like the president is the boss of the FBI, Governor Rick Scott is essentially the boss of Scott Israel, the sheriff, and as such he should be held accountable. He can’t just blame this on the bureaucracy and expect to get re-elected.

Aside from the blatant contradiction of Hogg’s earlier views, the main thing you should notice about this statement is that it is factually wrong. Scott is not the “boss” of Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel any more than Scott is the “boss” of the state’s mayors or legislators. The sheriff is an independently elected position. That’s a widespread feature of our Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement, which today’s young people might know if they weren’t too busy being taught to be shocked and offended by the phrase “Anglo-American.”

Counterattack Hard Against Liberal Attacks on Our Gun Rights and Other Civil Liberties

Kurt Schlichter:

We’re now supposed to give up our guns because it's the 21st Century, people, and the cops will totally protect us and oh, you can’t dare criticize the FBI for failing to disarm yet another ticking time bomb and what kind of crazy nut would expect a police officer to actually confront a gunman?

I guess we both have blood on our hands for having this chat - the real heroes are Sheriff Israel and the Broward Cowards. Because of the children or something.

But at CPAC, the president was super clear - he is not wavering on the Second Amendment. Sure, gooey puff boys like Marco Rubio are eager to roll over and show belly, but a hard line on our rights is not going anywhere. Hey Little Marco, this is the Republican Party, not the Foam Party.

Rubio, displaying the political savvy that convinced him to don a studded leather collar and be led around on a leash by Chuck Schumer, talked Congressman Brian Mast into rolling too. Suckers. The New York Times was delighted that Mast agreed to commit career suicide by sticking his constituents in the back when he tried to leverage his being a vet into somehow qualifying him to tell everyone else what their rights are. Amazing, but those of us vets who don’t dance to the libs’ tune never seem to get a Golden Ticket to the NYT op-ed page....

We have our own political power, and we need to exercise it - ruthlessly. The first step is an executive order at the federal level directing that no federal contract can go to any company that discriminates against an organization based on its advocacy or exercise of an enumerated constitutional right. We wouldn't allow a company to do business with our federal government if it discriminated on other grounds, so why should we do it discriminate on political grounds? Why should taxpayers be subsidizing people who hate them? When those government employees start walking past the Hertz and National counters, the liberal jerks who run those companies are going to find that they're posing and posturing has a price.

Next, Congress needs to pass a comprehensive non-discrimination regime designed to protect us into law and allow individuals and entities the right to sue any business that discriminates on the basis of the advocacy for exercise of any constitutional right. We need to make sure there are huge penalties for non-compliance – how about $1 million a day? We also need attorneys’ fees provisions for the plaintiffs as well, because we want to turn lawyers into bounty hunters seeking out these posers who are doing so much damage to our society by collaborating in the suppression of speech that the elite does not approve of.

We could call it the “Civil Rights Anti-Discrimination Act” and dare the Democrats to vote against it. Now, of course, due to the filibuster, it might be tough to pass a law protecting our rights through Congress, but we own about 30 legislatures. That's 30 states that can each outlaw this kind of discrimination within their borders. So Hertz and National, welcome to a whole bunch of lawsuits in Texas and Wyoming and elsewhere. But hey, it's worth it because of the children, right?

The liberals are also pushing venues like Amazon and Roku to drop NRA News - to actively censor a news outlet because they don't like its agenda (I appear regularly on it). The difference between government censorship and corporate censorship is no difference at all. Again, the federal government and the states have the power to regulate. Once again, we must ban discrimination on the basis of advocacy for or exercise of constitutional rights, and empower individual plaintiffs to seek penalties and attorneys’ fees for violations. If these companies really believe what they're doing is right, they can hire lawyers in 30 states.

In fact, it’s clearly time to consider antitrust investigations and other legislation designed to bring to heel the massive, unaccountable, agenda-driven big Silicon Valley players.

Now, this all doesn't sound very conservative does it? Well, that's the response Democrats are counting on, that we will pretend the old rules still apply while they're jamming us with the new ones. These attacks are a fundamental assault on the liberty of normal Americans. We need to recognize them for what they are, and we need to exercise our own political power to defeat this attack on our ability to participate in our own governance. Bake us a cake, jerks. We warned you – you are going to hate the new rules.

Monday, February 26, 2018

New you won't get from the MSM who jut loved the Norks and their cheerleaders.

Too many in the media went gaga over Dear Leader’s wicked sister — after all, at least she’s not Pence! — and they cheered on the cult-victim North Korean cheerleaders as if they had something to cheer about.

Now, it turns out, those cheerleaders are forced to have sex with party leaders. From the New York Post story:

Members of the North Korean national cheerleading squad — who have been featured gleefully rooting at the PyeongChang Winter Olympics — are systematically forced to have sex with high-ranking members of Kim Jong Un’s twisted regime, according to a disturbing report.

Behind the scenes, the troupe — dubbed the “Pleasure Squad” by insiders — are forced to perform sex acts on party leaders during their trip to the Olympics, a defector with knowledge of the sexual slavery told Bloomberg News.

0

“[The] troupe came here and performed with dances and songs, and it might seem like a fancy show on the outside [but] they also have to go to parties and provide sexual services,” said defector Lee So Yeon, a military musician who fled the country in 2008, during Kim Jong Un’s regime.

“They go to the central Politburo party’s events, and have to sleep with the people there, even if they don’t want it,” said Yeon, 42.

CONTINUING ITS DESCENT INTO ABJECT IDIOCY, the Southern Poverty Law Center is now calling my wife a “Male Supremacist.” I call the SPLC a scam and increasingly a hate group itself. The difference is, I’m right. And yes, Helen is “far more qualified than anyone from the SPLC,” a two-bit bunch of grifters that sells the media political cover for messages the media want to send anyway, while pretending to stand for something decent.

Saturday, February 24, 2018

On the other side, evidence has emerged in the past year that makes it clear there were organized efforts to collude against candidate Donald Trump–and then President Trump. For example:

Anti-Russian Ukrainians allegedly helped coordinate and execute a campaign against Trump in partnership with the Democratic National Committee and news reporters.

A Yemen-born ex-British spy reportedly delivered political opposition research against Trump to reporters, Sen. John McCain, and the FBI; the latter of which used the material–in part–to obtain wiretaps against one or more Trump-related associates.

There were orchestrated leaks of anti-Trump information and allegations to the press, including by ex-FBI Director James Comey.

The U.S. intel community allegedly engaged in questionable surveillance practices and politially-motivated “unmaskings” of U.S. citizens, including Trump officials.

So says Gateway Pundit, quoting an old news story identifying one "Jake Tapper" as a spokesman for Handgun Control, Inc. (which would later become the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence).

Now, I suppose it's possible that the Jake Tapper mentioned here is not the same Jake Tapper who a large number of cucky "conservatives" have homoerotic (at the very least) crushes on, but I've scanned Jake Tapper's twitter feed for a claim like this -- "Wrong Jake Tapper," that kind of thing -- and as far as I can tell he's just completely ignoring it.

And when someone in the media simply ignores a charge that they obviously have the power to respond to -- well, you can decide for yourself.

Of course, CNN did not disclose this before, during, or after its rowdy, Beer Hall Putsch-style "townhall," nor have they ever disclosed it, as far as I know.

By the way, a father and daughter have come forward to accuse CNN not of "scripting" questions as another Parkland student alleged, but at least of only soliciting a certain kind of opinion for their political advertisement masquerading as news.

But the political blunders paled in comparison with the more visible cultural missteps. On several occasions Trudeau and his family appeared dressed in traditional Indian clothing, something other Western politicians don't usually attempt with such vigor.

Prominent Indian personalities expressed their distaste for Trudeau's dress, with India Today calling it "tacky." Trudeau showed up at an event full of Bollywood stars in full traditional dress, while the movie stars themselves simply wore black suits.

On social media, popular Indian personalities put it more bluntly, calling for Trudeau to "have some chill" and calling his outfit choices "fake and annoying."

It's almost as if the FBI doesn't care about school shootings AND is grossly incompetent.

The FBI was told of a threat accused Florida shooter Nikolas Cruz made on YouTube last September but never contacted the company to track down its source, missing an early indicator, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley said Friday.

Someone reported the online threat to the FBI and the bureau opened a counterterrorism investigation but closed it on Oct. 11 saying it never managed to identify the person behind the post.

It wasn’t until after last week’s school massacre that the FBI did track down the author and found it was the 19-year-old man now accused of slaying 17 people at his former high school, Mr. Grassley’s office said, after getting briefings from both the FBI and Google.

Friday, February 23, 2018

Special counsel Robert Mueller has indicted 13 Russian nationals for allegedly conspiring to sow confusion in the 2016 presidential election. The chance of extraditing any of the accused from Vladimir Putin’s Russia is zero.

Some of the Russians’ Keystone Cops efforts to disrupt the election favored Donald Trump (as well as Bernie Sanders). Yet Mueller’s team made it clear that the Russians neither colluded with any U.S. citizens nor had any material effect on the election’s outcome.

But from here on out, there will be ironies, paradoxes, and unintended consequences with just about everything Mueller does.

Is it now time to prosecute foreigners for attempting to interfere with a U.S. election? If so, then surely Christopher Steele, the author of the Fusion GPS dossier, is far more culpable and vulnerable than the 13 bumbling Russians.

Steele is not a U.S. citizen. Steele colluded with Russian interests in compiling his lurid dossier about Donald Trump. Steele did not register as a foreign agent. And Steele was paid by Hillary Clinton’s campaign to find dirt on political rival Trump and his campaign.

In other words, Steele’s position is far worse than that of the Russians for a variety of reasons. One, he is easily extraditable while the Russians are not. Two, his efforts really did affect the race, given that the dossier was systematically leaked to major media and served as a basis for the U.S. government to spy on American citizens. Three, unlike with the Russians, no one disputes that American citizens—Hillary Clinton, members of the Democratic National Committee, and anti-Trump partisan Glenn Simpson and his Fusion GPS team—colluded by paying for Steele’s work.

Mueller’s team has also leveraged a guilty plea from former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn for making false statements to FBI investigators. If the Flynn case is now the Mueller standard, then we know that a number of high-ranking officials are vulnerable to such legal exposure.

Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr deliberately omitted on federal disclosure forms the fact that his wife, an expert on Russia, worked on the Fusion GPS dossier.

Steele himself probably lied to the FBI went he claimed he had not leaked the dossier’s contents to the media.

Hillary Clinton aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills likely lied to FBI investigator Peter Strzok (who had also interviewed Flynn) when they claimed they had no idea that Clinton was using a private and illegal email server until the story went public. In fact, Abedin and Mills had communicated with Clinton over the same server—as did then-President Barack Obama, who likewise denied that he knew about the improper server.

Former FBI Director James Comey likely lied to Congress when he claimed that his exoneration of Clinton came after he had interviewed her. We now know from documents that he drafted a statement about the conclusion of the investigation even before he met with her.

As far as obstruction charges go, Mueller has other possible targets. Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch met secretly with Bill Clinton on a jet parked on a tarmac in Phoenix shortly before the Justice Department closed the probe of Hillary Clinton and chose not to pursue charges against her. Comey said Lynch asked him not to use the word “investigation” when discussing the Clinton email probe. Text messages between Strzok and fellow FBI official Lisa Page suggest that Lynch knew in advance about the conclusions Comey would reach in the investigation.

Thursday, February 22, 2018

Yesterday on Bret Baier’s Special Report, his panel was discussing President Trump’s latest tweets about Russia. Charles Lane suggested that we reflect on how Trump has attacked Barack Obama over Russia and asserted the superiority of toughness towards Putin. “There was a time,” Lane said, when the very fact of such attacks and assertions by a president on his predecessor would widely have been considered outrageous.

Lane may be right. But note how carefully he chose his words. He said “there was a time,” not “until now.”

Lane had good reason to choose the words he did. As president, Obama did not hesitate to attack his predecessor, George W. Bush....

To be sure, Obama was never as nasty about Bush as Trump has been at times about Obama. Trump’s approach to his predecessor has been a full step less civil than Obama’s was.

But there’s another factor to consider. It’s now clear that the Obama administration, almost certainly with Obama’s knowledge, used dirty (and probably illegal) tactics to undermine Trump. To paraphrase Charles Lane, there was a time when the tactics used by Team Obama against Donald Trump would widely have been considered outrageous. They still would be if used against a Democrat.

Consider the Obama DOJ’s submission supporting its application to engage in electronic surveillance against Carter Page. From all that appears, it relied on unverified information in a dossier put together by an operative paid by the Clinton campaign.

Moreover, the target, Page, had been cooperating with the FBI for several years. In fact, it seems that he had helped catch Russian spies.

There was no national security reason to spy on Page. He was not the Trump campaign guy who bragged in London about the campaign having Russian dirt on Hillary Clinton. That was George Papadopoulos who, as far as I know, never had his phone tapped.

The only logical reason I can think of for tapping Page’s lines was to obtain information about Trump and his campaign. And this was only the beginning of Team Obama’s effort to undermine and delegitimize Trump and his administration. Anyone who has been reading Power Line this year knows what followed in this regard,

To summarize, Trump succeeds a president who relentlessly blamed his predecessor for America’s woes and his own failures. He succeeds a president whose top officials — James Clapper, John Brennan, Susan Rice, Sally Yates, et al — worked assiduously to put Trump and his presidency behind the eight ball and, indeed, quite possibly in legal jeopardy.

Does this explain why Trump has become so nasty towards Obama? I don’t know. Trump’s a nasty guy. He doesn’t require much provocation.

But no intelligent comparison between the present situation and how things were once upon a time in America can ignore Obama’s churlish approach to Bush and his administration’s subversive approach to Trump.

It's becoming abundantly clear that Obama went Richard Nixon's "Plumbers" one better and wiretapped the Trump campaign for nefarious political reasons.

As fun as it is to ridicule the FBI for devoting massive resources to chasing down Hillary Clinton’s oppo research while blowing off repeated, specific warnings about school shooter Nikolas Cruz, we’ve put a lot on the agency’s plate....

First- and second-generation immigrants have committed more than 40 percent of all mass shootings since 2000. I know we’ve been admitting Third World immigrants at a breakneck pace, but I don’t think immigrants make up nearly half the population yet.

Once we exclude the immigrant mass shooters, a clearer pattern emerges. The typical American perpetrator is a young man with paranoid schizophrenia — or, as we’re now euphemistically calling it, “autism” — probably exacerbated by pot, a deadly combo platter.

An immigration moratorium and widespread deportations would not only cut mass shootings in half, but it would also free up the FBI’s time to focus on these delusional young men with the terrifying stare, who hear voices no one else hears.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student Colton Haab said he was approached by CNN to ask a question at Wednesday night's town hall but decided not to after the network gave him a "scripted question," quashing one he wrote himself. Haab, a member of the Junior ROTC shielded students while the school was under attack from the shooter, said he was going to ask about using veterans as armed security guards.

Scandal: For more than a year, Democrats have been pushing the story that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to steal the election from Hillary Clinton. But the evidence keeps piling up indicating that it was Democrats, wittingly or not, who've been helping Russia achieve its real meddling goals....

But if you read the indictments, look at the Facebook ads, the Trump "dossier" and other evidence, it becomes clear that the goal of this meddling wasn't to elect Trump, but to create anger, hostility, bitterness, and discord in the U.S....

So, to sum up: There's been no credible evidence presented so far — none — of any collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia to sway the November election, despite more than a year-and-a-half of relentless FBI and media investigations.

But there is growing evidence that, as Facebook's Goldman put it:

"The main goal of the Russian propaganda and misinformation effort is to divide America by using our institutions, like free speech and social media, against us. It has stoked fear and hatred amongst Americans. It is working incredibly well. We are quite divided as a nation."

Indeed it has worked incredibly well.

The problem is that Democrats and the mainstream press will never admit any of this, because if they did, they'd also be admitting that they were co-conspirators in this nefarious Russian campaign to undermine America's democratic institutions.

During the Cold War, there was a label for Americans who unwittingly did Russia's bidding — "useful idiots."

Wednesday, February 21, 2018

No better way of fomenting hate than drawing attention to Joy-Ann Reid.

In fact, Joy-Ann Reid has made somewhat of a sport out of criticizing Sanders’ over the Russian issue in particular. Last year, she criticized Sanders and his supporters for repeating claims of Democratic National Committee fraud as little more than a Russian plot.

All in all, Reid was elevated by Russian trolls above Sanders by a ratio of roughly five-to-one.

The New York Times, which last year breathlessly claimed that “Russia Harvested American Rage to Reshape U.S. Politics,” reports that Donald Trump’s “admirers and detractors” both agree with him that “the Russians intended to sow chaos” and “have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.” A Times editorial assures skeptics that “the Russian subversion effort” was “sophisticated” and “breathtaking” in scope.

That analysis is at odds with the paper’s own reporting, which describes Russian trolls as “sloppy” and “amateurish” bumblers who sounded suspiciously like foreigners while posing as Americans, left a trail that made it easy to catch them, and produced crude propaganda that amounted to a drop in the raging river of online political speech. The only thing breathtaking about this influence campaign is the hyperventilation of the alarmists who talk as if we are just a few angry tweets from the abyss.

What’s totally missing from the indictment is the real reason that the 2016 election has divided the country more than any time since the Civil War. The Russians set off a few damp squibs. Meanwhile our very own Liberal media, with the apparent support of a politicized FBI, CIA and DOJ began lobbing nuclear bombs in the direction of Donald Trump, claiming that his election was illegitimate. The entire Liberal Establishment joined “The Resistance” as if they were French freedom fighters opposing the Nazis. It wasn’t the Russians calling Trump Hitler, Mussolini and worse. It wasn’t the Russians who claimed that Trump conspired with Putin to steal the election. It wasn’t the Russians who called Trump insane. It wasn’t the Russians who went on late night TV to tell dirty jokes about Trump fellating Putin. And it wasn’t the Russians who were demanding the end of the Trump administration via impeachment, a White House coup or assassination. That was the hysterics in the Liberal Establishment (along with the #NeverTrump Right).

Sullum again:

Richard Salgado, Google’s senior counsel on law enforcement and information security, testified that the company found 18 YouTube channels offering about 1,100 videos with political content that were “uploaded by individuals who we suspect are associated with this [Russian] effort.” The videos, which totaled 43 hours on a platform where 400 hours of content are uploaded every minute and more than 1 billion hours are watched every day, “mostly had low view counts,” with less than 3 percent attracting more than 5,000 views.

Salgado nevertheless deemed the Russian content “a serious challenge to the integrity of our democracy.” If our democracy cannot survive another 43 hours of political videos on YouTube, it was already doomed.

What do you mean "We" Mr. Never Trumper? Lowery has a point but misses the mark.

If only Joe McCarthy had lived to see this moment, when it’s suddenly in vogue to attribute large-scale events in American politics to the hand of Russia and to inveigh against domestic subversion.

Robert Mueller released an indictment of 13 Russians for crimes related to their social-media campaign to meddle in our internal affairs in the run-up to and aftermath of the 2016 election.

Mueller obviously isn’t a McCarthyite, and can’t be held responsible for the hysteria — and hopeful expectations of an impeachment-level event — that has built up around his work. His indictment is, as far as anyone can tell, rigorously factual.

That’s probably the point of it — to create a record of an episode that we should want to know as much about as possible and prevent from ever happening again.

[No. The point of the indictment is to be to generate publicity for the Anti-trumpists, because none of those indicted will voluntarily come to the US to face trial.]

But the scale of the operation shouldn’t be exaggerated. In the context of a hugely expensive, obsessively covered, impossibly dramatic presidential election, the Russian contribution on social media was piddling and often laughable.

The Russians wanted to boost Trump [No, the Russians wanted to dirty up the candidate who everyone assumed - including the Russians - would win the election. The Rusians also supported Sanders ans Jill Stein.]but as a Facebook executive noted, most of their spending on Facebook ads came after the election. The larger goal was to sow discord, yet we had already primed ourselves for plenty of that.

...

If you read the Mueller indictment, you might think the Russians were everywhere, not only advertising on Facebook (“Trump is our only hope for a better future”; “Ohio Wants Hillary 4 Prison”), but organizing rallies around the country.

But it’s not clear these rallies even came off.

The New York Post couldn’t find any evidence of planned pro-Trump and anti-Hillary rallies in New York — not exactly a swing state — in June and July of 2016. Pictures and videos that appear to be from Russian-initiated pro-Trump “flash mobs” in Florida show a handful of people in various cities. This at a time when Trump was routinely holding rallies with thousands of people that garnered lavish media coverage.

Tuesday, February 20, 2018

As I said HERE, the American media are actively aiding the Russians divide the country.

One of the revelations in Friday’s indictment handed down by Special Counsel Robert Mueller was that alleged Russian attempts to sow disunity in 2016 included the organization of both pro- and anti-Trump rallies in New York City on the Saturday after Election Day.

A check of their November 12 coverage showed both CNN and MSNBC gave enthusiastic coverage to the Russian-organized anti-Trump rally that day, with live reports every hour. Correspondents celebrated the idea that it was “a love rally,” and repeated the marchers’ anti-Trump mantras, such as: “We reject the President-elect.”

While the two liberal anti-Trump networks offered heavy coverage of the anti-Trump rally throughout the day, a check of coverage between noon and 5:00 p.m. Eastern found that the Fox News Channel offered only a short re-cap (66 seconds) at the start of their 4:00 p.m. Eastern hour.

Of course, none of the networks were aware of who was allegedly behind the march, but CNN and MSNBC reveled in the inflammatory messages of the march. At one point, MSNBC anchor Alex Witt credulously responded to the ridiculously alarmist rhetoric: “That woman, when she’s saying she’s concerned that black people will be shot in the street....Is that a legitimate concern for her? Because, that’s scary.”

Correspondent Morgan Radford cheerfully played along: “Alex, it’s not only a legitimate concern for her, it’s a legitimate concern for a lot of people I’ve spoken to....They’re wondering if this [Trump’s election] is almost a license to carry in terms of hate.”

If the goal of the secret Russian organizers was to inject nonsense like that into the American political dialogue, then their unwitting helpers on CNN and MSNBC certainly gave them plenty of assistance that day.

Both CNN and MSNBC talked about who they thought was organizing the rally. On MSNBC a few minutes before the march began, anchor Alex Witt asked Radford: “Hey, Morgan, can you tell who has organized this rally?...Is there someone in charge here?”

“Right now, this is lots of different groups of people who have come together,” Radford explained, “with no, necessarily, official leader, and that’s been some of the criticism.”

An hour later on CNN, correspondent Brynn Gingras said the rally had been organized by “a 20-year-old student from St. John’s University here in New York....We’ve seen him several times shaking hands with police officers....It is the most organized protest that I’ve seen here in New York City.”

A little after 3:00 p.m. Eastern, Gingras marveled at the crowd size, saying she had been “texting with the person, a 20-year-old college student here in New York City who organized this protest. I’ve been texting with him, and I asked, ‘Are you impressed with the size,’ and he says ‘It’s amazing what the collective voices can spread.’”

WHY SPECULATE? A talk by Michael Crichton

There are two times in a man’s life when he should not speculate: when he can’t afford it and when he can. —Mark Twain

My topic for today is the prevalence of speculation in media. What does it mean? Why has it become so ubiquitous? Should we do something about it? If so, what? And why? Should we care at all? Isn’t speculation valuable? Isn’t it natural? And so on.

I will join this speculative trend and speculate about why there is so much speculation. In keeping with the trend, I will try to express my views without any factual support, simply providing you with a series of bald assertions.

This is not my natural style, and it’s going to be a challenge for me, but I will do my best. Some of you may see that I have written out my talk, which is already a contradiction of principle. To keep within the spirit of our time, it should really be off the top of my head.

Before we begin, I’d like to clarify a definition. By the media I mean movies, television, Internet, books, newspapers and magazines. Again, in keeping with the general trend of speculation, let’s not make too many fine distinctions.

First we might begin by asking, to what degree has the media turned to pure speculation? Someone could do a study of this and present facts, but nobody has. I certainly won’t. There’s no reason to bother. The requirement that you demonstrate a factual basis for your claim vanished long ago. It went out with the universal praise for Susan Faludi’s book Backlash, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction in 1991, and which presented hundreds of pages of quasi-statistical assertions based on a premise that was never demonstrated and that was almost certainly false.

Ann Coulter: ANATOMY OF A COUP

So it's rather important that they both are Trump-hating fanatics, and one was being paid by Trump's political opponent in a presidential campaign.

Steele is the author of the preposterous dossier that sparked the special counsel investigation, and Strzok is the FBI agent involved at every crucial turn of both the Trump and Hillary investigations.

As we found out from the House Intelligence memo, Steele told Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr that he "was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president." (Ohr's wife worked for Fusion GPS, and, like Steele, was being paid by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.)

In the hands of Trump-obsessive Peter Strzok -- he of the estrogen-dripping texts to his Trump-hating FBI lawyer mistress -- the dossier was used to obtain a warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act against Trump's alleged "foreign policy adviser," Carter Page.

The FISA warrant against Page constitutes the last crumbling piece of the "Russia collusion" story.

Saturday, February 17, 2018

Mueller Indicts MSM

Mueller Indicts MSM

The
Mueller indictment states that the purpose of Russia’s efforts surrounding the last
general election was to sow discord.The
indictment states that the Russians made use of “divisive U.S. political and social issues,” to set
Americans against each other and “sow discord in the U.S. political system.”

The indictment goes on to say that:

Defendant
ORGANIZATION had a strategic goal to sow discord in the U.S. political system,
including the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Defendants posted derogatory
information about a number of candidates, and by early to mid-2016,
Defendants'' operations included supporting the presidential campaign of the
-candidate Donald J. Trump ("Trump Campaign") and disparaging Hillary
Clinton. Defendants made various expenditures to carry out those activities,
including buying political advertisements on social media in the names of U.S.
persons and grassroots entities and U.S. persons, and without revealing their
Russian identities and ORGANIZATION affiliation, solicited and compensated real
U.S. persons to promote or disparage candidates. Some Defendants, posing as
U.S> persons and without revealing their Russian association, communicated
with unwitting individuals associated with the Trump Campaign and with other
political activists to seek to coordinate political activities.

If sowing discord was the object, any objective
observer would conclude that the Russians were spectacularly successful.For roughly half the country, Donald Trump is
an illegitimate President, soon to be impeached, a Russian puppet manipulated by
Putin, and the second coming of Hitler.

How did that happen if,
as asserted by the Mueller indictment, most of the Russian effort was to
disparage Hillary?The indictment is a
banal recitation of the use of social media, primarily Facebook and Twitter to call
Hillary names and to promote “flash mobs” for Trump.It is alleged that two of the thirteen people
indicted actually came to the U.S.There
is literally nothing in the indictment that would lead anyone to conclude that
the Russians had any effect on the election …. at all.Because that was not the objective.

In the face of a billion dollar Hillary
Clinton campaign here are examples of what the Mueller alleges the Russians
did:

a.
In or around June through July 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators
purchased advertisements on Facebook to promote the "March for Trump"
and "Down with Hillary" rallies.

b. Defendants and their co-conspirators used false U.S.
personas to send individualized messages to real U.S. persons to request that
they participate in and help organize the rally. To assist their efforts,
Defendants and their co-conspirators, through false U.S> personas, offered
money to certain U.S. personas to cover rally expenses.

c. On or about June 5, 2016, Defendants and their
co-conspirators, while posing as a U.S. grassroots activist, used the account
@March_for_Trump to contact a volunteer for the Trump Campaign in New York. The
volunteer agreed to provide signs for the "March for Trump" rally.

There is no reference in the indictment to the
number of real Americans who participated or who attended.It’s doubtful that it persuaded anyone to
change their vote and there is no assertion that it affected the election.

What’s totally missing from the indictment is
the real reason that the 2016 election has divided the country more than any
time since the Civil War.The Russians
set off a few damp squibs.Meanwhile our
very own Liberal media, with the apparent support of a politicized FBI, CIA and
DOJ began lobbing nuclear bombs in the direction of Donald Trump, claiming that
his election was illegitimate.The
entire Liberal Establishment joined “The Resistance” as if they were French
freedom fighters opposing the Nazis.It wasn’t the Russians calling Trump Hitler,
Mussolini and worse.It wasn’t the
Russians who claimed that Trump conspired with Putin to steal the
election.It wasn’t the Russians who
called Trump insane.It wasn’t the
Russians who went on late night TV to tell dirty jokes about Trump fellating
Putin.And it wasn’t the Russians who
were demanding the end of the Trump administration via impeachment, a White
House coup or assassination.That was
the hysterics in the Liberal Establishment (along with the #NeverTrump Right).

There may be more indictments to come.The question needs to be asked: was there
another group of unidentified Russian operatives working behind the scenes to
influence American opinion makers?What
made the Democrat Party operatives, member of the media, and the entertainment
industry refuse to acknowledge that they lost an election?Posting on Facebook and Twitter, getting
someone to hold up a sign, paying someone to dress up as Hillary in prison is
all very well.But the biggest weapons
in a culture war are found in newsprint or over the airwaves.

“Regular” people, as Kurt Schlichter calls them
are really not the object of a sophisticated attack on a culture like
ours.If you want to really move the
needle you influence the influencers: the press, the talking heads, the comedians
… and the educators who will influence the young “skulls full of mush.”If we really want to dive down and see what’s
causing this country to rise up against itself, this is worth examining in
detail.And this is not what Robert
Mueller and his merry men are interested in doing.

CNN: North Korea Dept. of Propaganda

TruthRevolt friend Christian Toto over at HollywoodInToto.com has helpfully rounded up a sample of movie reviews of openly conservative director Clint Eastwood's new terrorism drama The 15:17 to Paris. The film is based on the true-life Islamist attack on a Paris-bound train in 2015 that was quickly thwarted by three American heroes who happened to be passengers on that train.

And:

"A few critics hated how Eastwood didn’t give enough screen time to the terrorist in question, Ayoub El-Khazzani," wrote Toto, such as this reviewer fromThe National Post:

15:17 to Paris overly simplifies the attack and its aftermath. The terrorist (Ray Corasani) snarls and wears sneakers, but there’s little more to him.

The movie's not about him. The movie is about the three American heroes. And to the outrage of leftist reviewers, Eastwood apparently wasn't inclined to depict a sympathetic terrorist. This is a Clint Eastwood movie, not a Rolling Stone magazine cover.

It's bad enough for a law enforcement agency to be biased. It's even worse for it to be biased and incompetent.

For the last few weeks we have been digesting the nauseating probability that the FBI used a dossier paid for by the Clinton campaign and ginned up by an assembly of creepy political hatchet men and women (Blumenthal, Shearer, Steele, two Ohrs, etc.) with input from various "friends of the Kremlin" in order to spy on an American citizen and, undoubtedly, Donald Trump, before and after he became president.

In other words, the FBI displayed the behavior of a Banana Republic in its bias (well, it's a lot more than that, sadly ) at the same time it demonstrated it's incompetence by doing so in a manner that would so easily—despite their myriad redactions—finally be uncovered. Many have stated they felt they could do this—play fast and loose—because Clinton's victory was assured, but even that was no guarantee. Documents exist. Did they think Tom Fitton and Judicial Watch would stop their FOIA requests? Eventually, the truth gets known. Whether anyone does anything about it is another matter.

This "biased incompetence" has not gone away. It showed up again Friday in the supposedly momentous announcement by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein that 13 Russian nationals and three Russian companies have been indicted for monkeying with our 2016 election via social media. Two of them even came to the U.S. to do it. Aiming to wreak havoc with our system, they are alleged to have done everything from exploiting minority groups (in the grand Soviet tradition) to instigating pro and con Donald Trump demonstrations on the same day.

Disinformation, as most intelligence officials know, or should, has been a hallmark of Russian intelligence since the czars. (Remember The Protocols of the Elders of Zion?) These particular Russkies began their disinformation campaign back in 2014, two years before the election.

Wait... 2014?

Where was the FBI? Why did it take them so long to unmask a fairly paltry one million dollar Internet campaign using the most old-style Soviet front groups, although throwing them up online this time? Could it be because this all got started under Obama and he was the one who famously excoriated Mitt Romney during the 2012 presidential debates for daring to point out that Russia was still a serious threat? Obama (busy cozying up to and ultimately enriching Iran) accused Mitt of being back in the eighties. The Cold War had been over for twenty years. No wonder the FBI wasn't paying much attention to Putin & Co.

Evidently it took the Trump-Russia gambit to get them off their duffs to discover this giant espionage ring—this even though Rosenstein admitted during his press conference it had no impact on the election and did not involve a single willing U.S. citizen. At certain levels, it seemed almost like a practical joke.

On the House side, Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., among a few others, was allowed to read the memos under the same conditions: FBI minder, no copies, no notes.

What struck Gowdy was the general absence of classified information in the memos or any other reason they should remain secret. Out of a total of seven memos, the FBI had marked four as classified at the "secret" or "confidential" levels — not the highest level — but even with those memos, it appeared to Gowdy that they could be released publicly with only minimal blacking-out.

"What would need to be redacted would be incredibly small and really would not interfere with the substance of the memos," Gowdy told me in a phone conversation Wednesday. "I read them a long time ago, and I still don't know why they're not in the public domain. If they were really helpful for the Democrats, they would have been leaked a long time ago."...

"I have read the memos," Gowdy said on Fox News "Special Report" Monday. "They would be defense Exhibit A in an obstruction of justice case — not prosecution exhibit, defense Exhibit A. If Comey felt obstructed, he did a masterful job of keeping it out of the memos."

Dalhousie University says its search for a new senior administrator will be restricted to "racially visible" and Indigenous candidates, part of its efforts to increase underrepresented groups on the Halifax campus.

In a memo to the university community, provost and vice-president academic Carolyn Watters said the prerequisite is in line with the principles of Dalhousie's employment equity policy.

"We have embarked on the process of selecting a new vice-provost student affairs," she stated in the memo last month, adding that the search "will be restricted to racially visible persons and Aboriginal Peoples at this time."

James Taranto has moved on from his daily online Best of the Web column and his recurring documentation of New York Timesthink under the catchphrase “Fox Butterfield, is that you?” Butterfield was the Times reporter endlessly befuddled by, or indignant over, high incarceration rates coupled with low crime rates. Invoking Butterfield, Taranto noted cases of reported contradiction where correlation was more like it.

CBS Minnesota affiliate WCCO introduces Pat Kessler’s story on gun ownership with this classic of the genre: “More people are carrying guns than ever before, but the crime rate remains relatively low.” Kessler himself reports: “Minnesota’s violent crime rate hit a 50-year low in 2016, according to the FBI. And in 2017, the state set a new record for firearms background checks.”

Friday, February 16, 2018

This is the kind of thinking that the Democrats and the Press, - but I repeat myself - hates.

“I oppose politicized science,” she writes, “in which researchers cannot study certain subjects -- or even ask certain questions -- for fear of a career-ending backlash and persecution.” Noting that America “was founded on the principle of open discourse” and that “[i]ntellectual diversity and vigorous, reasoned debate have been fundamental to America’s success, making us the freest, most prosperous, and most innovative society in human history,” Rebekah Mercer warns that “we have lost our way” and that “America is now a society that threatens, pillories, and harms those who dare to question the status quo.”

This is a good time to quote The Onion on another "...massive, unaccountable government secret agencies of the United States."

Stressing that such an action would be highly reckless, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned Thursday that releasing the “Nunes Memo” could potentially undermine faith in the massive, unaccountable government secret agencies of the United States. “Making this memo public will almost certainly impede our ability to conduct clandestine activities operating outside any legal or judicial system on an international scale,” said Wray, noting that it was essential that mutual trust exist between the American people and the vast, mysterious cabal given free rein to use any tactics necessary to conduct surveillance on U.S. citizens or subvert religious and political groups. “If we take away the people’s faith in this shadowy monolith exempt from any consequences, all that’s left is an extensive network of rogue, unelected intelligence officers carrying out extrajudicial missions for a variety of subjective, and occasionally personal, reasons.” At press time, Wray confirmed the massive, unaccountable government secret agencies were unaware of any wrongdoing for violating constitutional rights.

Wednesday, February 14, 2018

The FISA-gate, Clinton emails, and Uranium One scandals are sort of reaching a consensus. Many things quite wrong and illegal were done by both Hillary Clinton and her entourage and members of the Obama agencies and administration — both the acts themselves and the cover-ups and omissions that ensued.

Remember, in the FISA-gate scandal such likely widespread criminal behavior was predicated on two premises: 1) certainty of an easy Clinton victory, after which the miscreants would be not only excused but probably rewarded for their zeal; 2) progressive hubris in which our supposedly moral betters felt it their right, indeed their duty, to use unethical and even unlawful means for the “greater good” — to achieve their self-described moral ends of stopping the crude and reactionary Trump.

The wrongdoing probably includes attempting to warp a U.S. election, Russian collusion, repeatedly misleading and lying before the FISA courts, improperly surveilling American citizens, unmasking the names of citizens swept up in unlawful surveillance and then illegally leaking them to the press, disseminating and authenticating opposition smears during a political campaign, lying under oath to Congress, obstructing ongoing investigations, using federal funds to purchase ad hominem gossip against a presidential candidate, blatant conflicts of interests, weaponizing federal investigations, trafficking in and leaking classified information . . . The list goes on and on.

The State Department is now involved. Apparently anyone who was a former Clinton smear artist can pass fantasies to a sympathetic or known political appointee at State. And if the “dossier” fits the proper narrative and shared agenda, it gains credence enough to ensure that it is passed up to senior State officials and on to the FBI. Perhaps a private citizen with a grudge against a rival should try that as well. These scandals will grow even greater before various congressional investigations expire....

I think the Democratic fallback position will be to point to the career carnage at the FBI and DOJ as punishment enough.

Director Comey was fired. Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was forcibly retired. FBI lawyer Lisa Page was reassigned and demoted. FBI general counsel James Baker resigned. Senior agent Peter Strzok was reassigned and demoted. The former FBI director’s chief of staff, James Rybicki, resigned. Mike Kortan, FBI assistant director for public affairs, took retirement. Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr was reassigned and demoted. Justice Department’s counterintelligence head, David Laufman, resigned. A cadre of others “unexpectedly” have left, allegedly (or conveniently) for private-sector jobs. Such career implosions do not happen without cause.

Voters would only grow more cynical if some Americans were allowed to abuse constitutionally protected civil liberties, and to lie to the Congress, the FBI, and the courts, while the less connected others go to jail for much less. Without a judicial accounting, it will be impossible to clean up the hierarchies of the FBI and the DOJ.

Indeed, absent accountability and punishment, the new modus operandi would be for any lame- duck incumbent administration to use federal agencies to enhance the campaign of its own party’s nominee. It would be only logical to conclude that criminal acts used to help a successor would be forgotten or rewarded under the victor’s tenure.

...
We can't allow this to end with a standoff, where the people who committed crimes and tried to remove a freely elected President get away with it. It's not good for the country.

Attorney General Sessions must find muscular, ambitious, and combative prosecutors (preferably from outside Washington, D.C., and preferably existing federal attorneys), direct them to call a Grand Jury, and begin collating information from congressional investigations to get to the bottom of what is likely one of gravest scandals in post-war American history: the effort to use the federal government to thwart the candidacy of an unpopular presidential candidate and then to smear and ruin his early tenure as president.

Only another prosecutorial investigation, one way or another, will lead to resolution, take the entire mess out of the partisan arena, and keep the anemic Mueller investigation honest — with the full knowledge that if its own investigators have violated laws or used tainted evidence or in the past obstructed justice, then they too will be held to account.

Scott wrote this morning about the extraordinary email that National Security Advisor Susan Rice wrote to herself at 12:15 on January 20, 2017, within minutes of when President Trump was inaugurated. It must have been her last act, more or less, before she vacated the White House. So obviously the email was important to her. But why would it be important to send an email to herself (the only person copied was one of her aides)?

If you read the email, which Scott posted along with Senator Grassley’s letter to Rice, it is obvious that it is a CYA memo. But the question is, whose A is being C’d?

This is why the Trump administration is a new broom that sweeps away the old.

The Trump administration recently announced that it will “reassess” American aid to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA). That’s the agency charged with overseeing Palestinian refugees displaced in 1948 and, of equal importance, their descendants. The United States will now voluntarily contribute to the agency only $60 million rather than the expected contribution of $360 million, with all subsequent funding subject to further consideration...

And UNRWA is hardly the “relief” and “education” organization portrayed in Western and Arab media. During Israel’s 2014 war with Hamas, its hospitals and schools were commonly used to stockpile Hamas weapons and explosives. The agency “strongly condemned” the use of its hospitals and schools in this way, but these condemnations somehow didn’t stop the practice. In the past two years, moreover, illegally built tunnels have been found beneath UNRWA schools in Gaza. By propping up the UNRWA, the United States was helping to fund anti-Israel terrorism while at the same time helping to fund Israel’s defense against that terrorism.

'Shut the f**k up, a**hole,’ snarled Omarosa Manigault-Newman at me. ‘How are your kids going to feel when they wake up and discover their dad’s a f**king f*gg*t?’

Yes, this is the same Omarosa Manigault-Newman who just spent a year inside Donald Trump’s White House.

I’ve met a lot of vile human beings in my life, from dictators and terrorists to sex abusers and wicked conmen.

But I’ve never met anyone quite so relentlessly loathsome as Omarosa; a vicious, duplicitous, lying, conniving, backstabbing piece of work.

Omarosa sidled up to me at the New York Mercantile Exchange and said, quite seriously: 'Piers, do you want a showmance?' 'A what?' I replied. 'A showmance. You know, a romance on the show - we get it on together. Happens all the time on Apprentice. Everyone has sex together. Then we can make lots of money out of it.’ I stared at her grasping, ferociously ambitious little eyes, and laughed: 'You must be joking, you deluded woman.' She didn't take it well. 'What are you? Gay?'